Fiery buses, beer showers and the smell of manure: life in ice hockey’s minor leagues

WWhen Arizona Sundogs rookie Joey Sides walked into the Wichita Thunder minor league hockey arena in 2009, he smelled manure. It was no wonder: the location also served as home for the local rodeo. But that was nothing compared to the stands, which seemed to go almost straight up. Behind the bench, fans could practically reach out and grab the players’ jerseys – they were that close. You could hear everything the wild crowd of about 10,000 people said. “It felt like chaos there,” Sides said. The mob threw beer at players and was dragged out of the stadium by security. “I heard one of the fans yelling at my friend on the ice saying, ‘Hey, Jonesy! Mix in a salad, you fat bastard!’ while throwing a beer at him. It was crazy.”

Then later in his career there was the time another team bought a decommissioned bus for the players at a bargain. “That thing broke down six times for us,” says Sides. It got so bad that the players agreed that if it showed up for a game against Kansas City, they would refuse to continue. But their coaches said the boycott would upset team owners. So they got in and drove. The bus had no shocks and Sides saw his teammates flying around, their heads hitting the ceiling, as he drove over speed bumps. At a speed of 120 km/h, the vehicle blew a tire and the entire interior began to fill with dark smoke. It came to a stop on the highway. The players sat on the side of the road for so long waiting for another ride that the sold-out game in Kansas City was canceled and the players instead celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at a city bar in Podunk, singing karaoke with the local population.

Another time during his rookie year in Arizona, tempers began to flare during a game. His coach deployed the team’s two 6-foot-2 enforcers, who started a brawl. “One of our enforcement officers knocked a man down on the bench right in front of me, then smiled and punched this man right in the face,” Sides said. “He takes off the kid’s helmet, it falls on my feet and my teammate starts dropping the helmet on his knees, flattens it into a pancake and then throws it into the penalty area. It was an absolute circus!” Another time, on yet another team, one of Sides’ assistant coaches tried to argue with a referee, throwing sticks and water bottles at him, taking off his suit jacket, ripping open his shirt and shouting, “Let’s get the fuck out !”

For Sides, who grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, this was all part of the life he lived for 15 years until he retired from hockey in 2023. Born in Tucson, Arizona, he always loved the game. Sides remembers his parents piling up foil so he could hit his sister’s roller skates around the kitchen with a mini hockey stick. Later, his father built an ice skating rink in the family’s backyard in Idaho, which the local fire department allowed him to fill with a fire hose connected to a fire hydrant. The rink became so popular that Wayne Gretzky stopped by a few times while vacationing in the resort during the 1994-95 NHL lockout. “The Great One” played with a nine-year-old Sides and his friends, signing sticks and sports cards. He even continued to eat. “He was the most gracious, generous man,” Sides says, still inspired.

In high school, he attended Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut, where he and his team won the New England Championships in his junior and senior years thanks to Sides and future NHLers Cam Atkinson and goaltender Jonathan Quick. After that, his dream was to play Division I hockey, but he did not receive any scholarship offers before graduation. So Sides instead played Division III at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. After Wentworth, Sides got a tryout in the American League, which is essentially the NHL’s best farm system.

In his very first professional game, Sides waited with his teammates in the tunnel to take the ice for a warm-up. They urged him on and told him that he was the one who would lead them out. “Doesn’t the goalkeeper usually do that?” he asked. But they said no, it was are first game. It was also a free T-shirt night and there were already several thousand fans in the stands. When the doors opened, Sides ran out, but no one followed. He was standing all alone on the other side of the rink. Welcome to the league, boy. Minor league hockey is full of jokes. From loosening a teammate’s skate and strapping it backwards to sticking rocks into someone’s hollowed-out hockey stick to mess with balance. But that’s the kind of thing Sides loves and remembers. “The relationships you build with players on the teams,” he says. “I’m so grateful for that.”

Camaraderie is crucial when young men travel by bus for half a season for between 50 and 72 games (depending on which league you are in) and each earn between $550 per week and $60,000 per year (if you have a two-way AHL contract). “My rookie year,” Sides says, “I was introduced to credit card roulette. There you all go out to eat and at the end of the meal you put your credit cards in a hat. Then the waitress comes by and takes them out one by one. The latter pays for the entire meal. Every time I played that I lost my shit. I was so nervous. The bill would be practically my entire salary! Luckily I never lost.”

During his career the skilled sides played abroad in the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland (where he was sponsored by a hotel) and Newfoundland, along with American cities such as Tulsa, Fort Collins, Wichita, Reading, Rapid City, Kansas City, Jacksonville.

“For me,” Sides says, “I had a career that was all over the map.” In the Netherlands, for example, he played in a city north of Amsterdam and the competition consisted of both indoor and outdoor courts – not exactly top class. “It just wasn’t the same level as playing pro in the States,” Sides said. However, in many of the smaller areas, fans had close relationships with their teams and Sides was stopped in supermarkets or on the street to sign autographs. It could even feel like European football, with fans in the arena beating the drums and going crazy for the hometown boys.

Now in his late 30s, he says his body remains in remarkably good shape – apart from the five shoulder surgeries he underwent for playing injuries. Career highlights include being perhaps the first hockey player ever to wear this jersey a GoPro camera during a professional game. When Sides was in Newfoundland, he saw icebergs floating through town (he even made cocktails from them), puffins hanging out, and humpback whales swimming offshore. In Scotland, his team was .500 and the owners threatened to send all 15 foreign players packing to save money. But the team promised improvement and they made a historic playoff run. He also took part in the first-ever professional hockey game at Lake Placid’s arena – the Olympic Center – where the US famously upset Russia in the 1980 Olympic Games, Miracle On Ice. Before the match he went into the stands to take it all in. “I just sat there and was so grateful that I was able to get as far as I could,” Sides said.

For Sides, who only set out to prove his worth after starting his pro career at a small Division III school, he has made his mark. A prolific goalscorer And speed demon on the icehe may also have found himself in the penalty area more than his coaches (or mother) would have liked. But minor league hockey can be brutal. Sometimes you have to fight back. “I like to say that I never started anything,” he says, laughing. “Just revenge.”

But today, with those 15 years behind him, he is happy with what he has seen and done. Now he moves and travels from Idaho to Brooklyn to start a new life with his girlfriend. But what’s most amazing, he says, is that as he drives across the country, there are countless people he knows along the way. Players, teammates, coaches from all his teams – friends who would welcome him when he needed to crash.